A social network service is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building social networks among people (e.g., who share interests and/or activities). A social network service typically consists of a representation of each user, his/her social links, and various other additional services. Most social network services are web based and provide means for users to interact over the Internet. Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks.
The main types of social networking services are those which contain category places (such as former school-year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages) and a recommendation system linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with the Facebook, Bebo and Twitter services widely used worldwide. The MySpace and LinkedIn services are also widely used in North America.
Traditionally, when joining a social network, a person has to build out his or her social network manually by adding friends. Often this requires that numerous requests be sent to and accepted by other persons that one desires to add as friends to his or her network. Additionally, conventional OpenSocial containers (e.g., iGoogle) require the user to explicitly declare those persons that are part of a group of “friends” and those persons that are merely part of the group “all.”
OpenSocial is an open source application programming interface (API) that provides ways to access social networking information. It also includes a specification for so-called gadgets, which are contained HTML/Javascript/CSS applications.
Traditional social networks (including those implementing OpenSocial containers) are hosted on a remote server. These social networks require that a user provide social data and information to the remote server (or to an Internet cloud), which the user does not control. Thus, the user is not able to fully ensure the privacy of the social data and information that is provided.